34 dom is illustrated supremely in the person of the King: it is in Him we see what greatness is and how it is attained. It is attained by service; at its greatest height it is attained by a service which for lowliness and sacrifice can never be outdone. The Speaker is the King, the Son of Man, who is to sit on the throne of His glory: and He is consciously reflecting, as in other places where He speaks of having come (Mark 217; Luke 95, 129, 1910; Matt. 517, 10 4 f.), on His vocation and the way in which it is to be fulfilled. There could not be a more solemn utterance, and most people will feel a natural reluctance to suppose that it has been modified in tradition. Yet this is one of the points at which a considerable body of criticism assails the evangelist's testimony. The last words of the sentence-'and to give His life a ransom for many'. are denied to Jesus. Partly this is done for what may be considered a properly critical reason. The parallel in Luke, it is said, does not contain them. But it is a fair question how far there is a parallel in Luke at all. Luke, as has been noticed, omits the whole incident of the sons of Zebedee, and the words of Jesus he reports in 22 27-For who is greater, he that sitteth at meat or he that serveth? is it not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth'-while they are akin to what we find here, are definitely appropriate to the supper-table at which they are spoken, and cannot be assumed to be an earlier and truer form of Mark 1O 45 Dismissing this textual reason, then, as inadequate to throw suspicion on the words, we turn the other way in which they are questioned. They represent, it is said, the Pauline doctrine of redemption, and are not on the same plane with the rest of the passage. When Jesus speaks of service, He speaks of something in which the disciples are to follow Him: 'I came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and you must live in the same spirit; you must serve as I serve if you wish to share My greatness in the Kingdom.' This, it is said, is intelligible and ethical, in harmony with all the teaching of Jesus; but with the giving of His life a ransom for many we have 2 μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος—the thought is transferred to another plane. This is not a service in which the disciples can follow Jesus; it is irrelevant and inappropriate here; and the inference is that it is not due to Jesus, but is an incongruous supplement to His words by the evangelist. In spite of the imposing names by which it is supported, this is not an argument which impresses the writer. The idea contained in the words 'to give His life a ransom for many' is not one which can have been strange to Jesus. The problem of finding a ransom or equivalent for forfeited lives is one to which He has already alluded in ch. 837: 'What shall a man give in exchange for his soul (or life)?' It appears in Old Testament passages with which He cannot but have been familiar. 'None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him: (for the redemption of their soul is costly, and must be let alone for ever:) that he should still live alway, that he should not see corruption' (Ps. 497 ff.). This supreme need of man-this service that none can render either to himself or his brother-is suggested also in Job 33 22. His soul draweth near to the pit, and his life to the destroyers. . . . Then He is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom.' It pervades the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where there is the same contrast as here between This is how it is put by Wellhausen, Evangelium Marci, ad loc. Loisy, ii. 241, says: 'L'idée de la vie donnée en rançon appartient à un autre courant que celle du service.' The other courant is that of Pauline theology. He refers to Rom. 153, Phil. 2 7-8, Gal. 1, 2 20, and then writes: 'Mark 105 paraît conçu d'après ces passages. L'idée du “rachat de vie” était familière à l'évangéliste, 8 37. Why not 'familière à Jésus'? It is His words which are quoted in 8 37. one and many-the one Righteous Servant and the many whom He justifies and whose sins He bears at the cost of giving His life for them (Is. 53 10-12). The ideas of the passage, therefore, present no antecedent difficulty: they are ideas which lie at the heart of the ancient religion. Further, there is nothing incongruous, nothing which makes us feel that we have risen (or sunk) to another plane of thought, when these, ideas are treated as if they were continuous with that of service. They really are continuous; they are naturally regarded by the Speaker as indicative of the supreme service which the many need and which He must render. He served them in numberless ways, but it was not inconsistent with any of these ways, it was only carrying service to its utmost limit, when He gave His life a ransom for them. It is quite true that the disciples cannot do the same service. Our lives have no such virtue in them as His sinless life, and cannot be prized at such a price. Nevertheless, we must follow Jesus in doing service even to this limit: 'We also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren' (1 John 3 16). If, now, there is no objection on these grounds to Jesus having uttered the words here put into His lips, the only ground on which they can be rejected is that they imply a consciousness, on the part of Jesus, of His own relation to the ideas they convey, which is inherently incredible. The ideas, it must be admitted, were in circulation, and the subsumption of them under the general conception of service is entirely appropriate; all that can be disputed is that Jesus made the application of them to Himself. This, it may confidently be said, can only be maintained against the total impression which the representation of Jesus in the gospels makes upon us. Jesus is not a prophet, He is to His own consciousness the Messiah, the Person through whom prophecy is to be fulfilled and the Kingdom of God established. To establish God's King dom is to do the supreme service to humanity, and just as we have seen Him already declare His sole adequacy to the task when it is conceived as the revelation of the Father (p. 239), so here we find Him declare His adequacy to it again when it is conceived as the ransoming of forfeited lives by the surrender of a life worth more than all. "To understand Him'-as Dr. George Adam Smith has said in a memorable page already quoted1-'it is sufficient to remember that the redemptive value of the sufferings of the righteous, an atonement made for sin not through material sacrifice but in the obedience and spiritual agony of an ethical agent, was an idea familiar to prophecy. It is enough to be sure, as we can be sure, that He whose grasp of the truths of the Old Testament excelled that of every one of His predecessors, did not apply this particular truth to Himself in a vaguer way, nor understand by it less, than they did. His people's pardon, His people's purity-foretold as the work of a righteous life, a perfect service of God, a willing self-sacrifice-He now accepted as His own work, and for it He offered His life and submitted unto death. The ideas, as we have seen, were not new; the new thing was that He felt they were to be fulfilled in His Person and through His Passion. But all this implies two equally extraordinary and amazing facts: that He who had a more profound sense than any other of the spiritual issues in the history of Israel, was conscious that all these issues were culminating to their crisis in Himself; and that He who had the keenest moral judgment ever known on earth was sure of His own virtue for such a crisis-was sure of that perfection of His previous service without which His self-sacrifice would be in ... vain. . . . It is a very singular confidence. Men there have been who felt themselves able to say "I know," and who died like Him for their convictions. But He was 1 Jerusalem, ii. 547 f. See above, p. 266. able to say "I am. I am that to which prophecy has pointed," and was able to feel Himself worthy to be that.' Nothing could be truer to the gospel presentation of Jesus. The difference between 'I know' and 'I am' is the difference between the prophet and the Saviour, between the Old Testament and the New; and the passage with which we are dealing, though a supremely important instance, is only one instance after all of the habitual and characteristic consciousness of Jesus. If it stood alone, the criticism which we have been discussing might seem more plausible; but careful scrutiny of the words in the light of Jesus' self-revelation as a whole lifts them above the shadow of a doubt. In regarding Jesus as Redeemer at the cost of His life, as well as Revealer of God, the consciousness of the New Testament Christian corresponds to the consciousness of the Christ Himself. THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM The incident we have just examined is closely followed in Mark by another in which also we see how Jesus thought of Himself. The circumstances of His entrance into Jerusalem were not accidental, so far as He was concerned. The fourth gospel, indeed, tells us that His disciples did not realise at the time what they were doing (1216): only after the resurrection did it occur to them that they had unconsciously been fulfilling prophecy. But Jesus, it may be said, organised the procession; He sent for the ass's colt on which He was to enter the capital in lowly state. On His part it is a Messianic act, and reveals the consciousness of the King. It is difficult to deny that the multitudes who shouted 'Hosanna' were without some perception of this, though their ideas of the kingship may have differed widely from His. They hailed Him as 'Son of David,' or thought of the Kingdom He |